


one and one and one is three

by tenderjock



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - andy is captured with joe and nicky, Gen, Local Woman Really Loves Booker But He's Canonically An Asshole, booker and nile accidentally become friends ?????, cw for canon-typical violence and alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28489977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenderjock/pseuds/tenderjock
Summary: They got Andy.
Relationships: Old Guard - team
Comments: 12
Kudos: 57





	one and one and one is three

**Author's Note:**

> big BIG thanks to @hauntedjaeger (saellys) / @hauntedfalcon on tumblr for betaing this thing right here. title is from come together by the beatles.

Andy tells them to wait for her signal and leaves, stalking away and grabbing a sword on her way out.  _ Her signal _ . Nile doesn’t even know what that means, but Booker seems to be more concerned with the way his guts are regenerating. To be fair, if it were her, she would probably be more concerned with her guts, too.

“Wait for the signal,” Booker says, mouth curling into what could generously be called a smile. 

Nile turns away from Booker. “How the hell can you even  _ tell?” _ she snaps. Booker, halfway through buttoning up his shirt, frowns.

“Ah,” he says, eyebrows snapping together. Nile stares at him, and realizes what he has realized, a second too late. The gunfire has stopped. A moment later, there is the sound of a heavy truck peeling out of the church’s gravel driveway.

“Fuck me,” Booker says. He abandons his shirt and swings Andy’s bag onto his shoulder. “Grab your stuff, come on.”

Nile stares after him. “What is it?” she says, following him with the duffel in hand. She gets to the first body and stumbles to a halt, while Booker continues past it, to the altar. Then there’s the second body, and the third, and a man’s gloved hand, sitting there on the floor with no man attached to it. But what stops Booker in his tracks in the center aisle of that little chapel is the sword lying in a pool of blood.

It’s a lot of blood. Nile feels a little dizzy. With a thundering roar, a plane passes by overhead. Booker swears again, this time in French, and stoops to pick up the sword.

“They got Andy?” Nile says. She’s not entirely sure if it’s a question.

“They got Andy,” Booker confirms. “And Nicky, and Joe.”

: :

“Andy,” Joe says, voice low and urgent. His words come to Nicky like they are spoken at the end of a great tunnel. “Andy, listen to me. Stay with me.”

Nicky sits up slowly. “ _ Amore _ ,” he says. “Where –”  _ are we, _ but it’s swallowed when he sees Andy lying there, Joe’s hands on her throat, keeping pressure on it with a bloody rag.

“ _ Habibi _ ,” Joe says. “Help me.” Nicky shifts over, presses his hands over Joe’s. Andy’s eyes flutter open and her mouth moves, silent. The blood is leaking out of her like a faulty faucet. That’s bad, definitely, but not as terrible as it could be. Nicky has seen much worse throat trauma. He’s  _ caused  _ much worse throat trauma.

“She isn’t healing,” Nicky says, in Italian. One of the guards kicks him in the ribs; he takes the blow without a glance. “Why isn’t she healing?”

“I don’t know what the fuck kind of language that is,” a guard says, “but shut up.” Both Joe and Nicky ignore him. Andy, prostrate on the floor and bleeding from the gash in her throat, likewise has other priorities.

“She’s lost it,” Joe responds in kind. His bloodstained hand tenses, curling around the proud line of her neck. Andy’s eyes blink open and focus after a second.

“Nicky,” she says, then: “Joe.” The guard to Nicky’s left stomps next to Andy’s head, a barely contained threat. The three of them throw a brief, synchronized look at him, then turn back to the matter at hand.

“Motherfucker slit my throat,” Andy says, in English. She bares her teeth in a terrible grin, eyes slipping shut. The grimace fades, leaving her lips in a thin white line on her pale face.

Nicky swears, gentle with it, and presses down harder on the makeshift bandage, which he now recognizes as the tattered remains of her shirt. The guards haven’t bothered to cuff her like they did Nicky and Joe. One of them shoves Nicky over with a booted foot. Joe hisses, equal parts fury and terror.

“She needs a doctor,” Joe says, back in English, sitting back on his haunches but still keeping his hands over her wound. Andy’s eyelashes flutter, weakly, the only sign that she’s in any pain. That’s not good, right? Nicky doesn’t know. It’s been a while since he’s had to deal with these things.

The guard laughs. Joe’s hands curl even tighter around Andy’s throat. He looks back down at her, and he’s on the verge of crying; Nicky can tell, after the hundreds of years that they’ve been through together.

The guard can tell, too, maybe, because he says, with a mocking edge to his voice, “You and your  _ boyfriend _ need to shut the fuck up. She’ll get to see a doctor, but I don’t think it’ll matter much whether she’s dead or alive when it happens.” The guard behind Joe snorts.

_ How many, _ Andy mouths, without opening her eyes.  _ How many _ , and Nicky might have missed it but for the way Joe’s eyes flicker to her and then up again.

_ “Quattro _ ,” Nicky says out loud. The talkative guard shifts, but before he can say a word, Andy rolls onto her side and stabs out with the knife she keeps in the top of her right boot. It bites deep into the guard’s thigh and he gives a wordless scream, instinctively curling around the wound. Andy keeps her grip on the knife.

The next cut is deep into the guard’s chest, and then Joe is moving, ramming an elbow into another guard’s throat. Nicky trips the third guard, headbutts the fourth, and then Joe is behind him, looping an arm around the first guard’s neck and snapping it with a sickening crunch.

It’s awkward, fighting in the confines of the armored truck, but Nicky has been in worse situations. The second guard unholsters his gun. Nicky catches his wrist, twists and pulls until he hears the shoulder pop. Andy stabs him in the eye. The knife sinks in deep, gets stuck on bone, and Andy, still on the floor, rolls away and puts a bloody hand to her wound.

There’s a moment of panting silence. It looks like Andy was also responsible for the third guard; he’s bled out from a cut to his femoral artery. The fourth guard has a traumatic brain injury, judging by the bloody welt on his temple and the uneven pupils. Nicky tugs on his restraints, then stops when Andy makes a low, pained noise.

“Andy,” he says, and goes to her. He and Joe have a brief, wordless debate as to whether they should keep her lying down or sit her up. Andy ends the argument by leveraging herself up into the seat that used to belong to the mouthy guard.

She mutters something in a language that Nicky doesn’t recognize, as Andy sometimes does. It’s probably a curse, or a prayer, although Andy doesn’t pray. Nicky throws in a silent Hail Mary, in Latin, of course. It can’t hurt, and it might help.

Joe is settling on Andy’s other side, bound hands coming up to her shoulder, when the truck slows to a stop. Nicky positions himself between Andy and the door.

The door is wrenched open from the outside. One of the guard’s corpses falls limply out of the truck, and Nicky hears six guns cock. He glances out the door at the mercenaries and Copley, the tool of their betrayal.

“I don’t suppose it would be possible to get these chains off of us?” he asks, keeping his body between those guns and Andy. She coughs, quiet, like she’s hiding a laugh.

“Get them  _ out _ ,” says the head security agent. Neither Joe nor Nicky makes a move to be helpful in that regard.

“She needs a doctor,” Joe says, again. Again, he is ignored, except by Copley.

“What happened to her?” he says, and if Nicky didn’t know that this man sold them out to the highest bidder, he might even say he sounded concerned. Andy bares her teeth in that feral smile.

“She’s bleeding out,” Joe says. “She’s not healing anymore.”

“What?” Copley says, a terrible, terrible expression on his face. “Wh – How?”

Joe doesn’t answer. Nicky says it, instead: “She’s lost her immortality. A  _ doctor, _ now.”

“There’s – there’s a medical kit on the plane,” Copley says, eyes huge and hands fluttering nervously. Nicky opens his mouth to say,  _ that’s not good enough _ , but the head security agent has popped inside the truck and forced Joe out. He turns to Nicky next, who tenses beside Andy.

“ _ Habibi _ ,” Joe says, and Nicky doesn’t know what might have followed, because Andy breaks her silence.

“Nicolo, go,” she says, thin and reedy but unwavering. “The others will come for us.” And there, finally, that shining moment of steely confidence that is so uniquely  _ Andromache _ that Nicky finds himself relaxing a little bit. If Andy could sound that sure about something, he doesn’t know how it could be impossible.

He gets out of the truck, refrains from helping Andy out, and is ushered in front of Joe into the plane.

“We are usually a better judge of character,” Nicky says, and is it his imagination or did something in Copley’s terrible expression turn briefly wry? “I suppose you are taking us to the person who paid for your betrayal,” and no, there it is again: something in the line of Copley’s mouth that seems bitterly amused.

Nicky doesn’t like being the butt of a joke. He tucks that look of Copley’s away in the back of his mind for dissection later.

“It’s a nice plane,” Joe says, twisting to throw a glance back at Andy, who is being half-dragged, half-carried by one of the security agents.

“There’s a TV, Joe,” Nicky says over his shoulder, hoping that his tone is light enough to mask the gut-wrenching fear that this whole situation is causing him right now.

“Champagne?” Joe tosses out. Andy laughs, rough and low, and is still laughing when they drag her onto the plane and handcuff her to a seat.

_ Like that would keep her down _ , Nicky thinks, and catches Andy’s eye as Copley moves in to bandage her neck wound. She meets his gaze, looking tired but steadier, now that she’s not on the floor of an armored van. She gives him a wink.

Andy had said that the others – Booker and Nile, the children, out there on their own – would come for them. Nicky lets his eyes close, his head fall back, and offers another Hail Mary.

It might help. It can’t hurt. Nicolo prays in the hope that Andy is right.

: :

The two of them drive all night, crossing over from France to England at about three a.m. and swapping cars not too long after. Booker is getting increasingly antsy. Nile stares out the window and wishes very strongly that this was not her life.

They’re still in the second car, going who the hell knows where, Booker driving, when he says, “It’s my fault.”

“She told you to wait for her,” Nile says, tired. She hasn’t gotten much sleep recently. She rests her forehead against the passenger seat window, feeling every bump of the road. “Even you can’t blame yourself for being hit with a grenade.”

Booker laughs, a horrible laugh, and brings a hand to his mouth like he can shove the sound back in. “Ah,” he says. “But I can.”

Nile frowns. Without taking her head off the window, she says, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It  _ was _ my fault,” Booker says. He comes to a complete halt in the middle of the road. Nile glances into the rearview mirror, thinking that maybe he’d seen something, but he appears to just be unable to talk, drink, and drive all at the same time. He rummages in a pocket, pulls out a little flask, and takes a swig.

“How was it your fault?” Nile says. She sits up in her seat. Her right hand goes to the little pistol she had taken from the last safehouse when she was pretty sure no one was paying attention. Maybe Andy noticed; Andy doesn’t seem the type to not notice things.

Booker lets out a deep breath, takes another swing. Then he says: “Copley said, he said we could save lives. That he’d find a way to end it, for us, if we wanted. All I had to do was –” Booker inhaled through his nose and shrugged, more than a bit drunkenly.

“What do you mean?” Nile says, horrible certainty rising up in her throat. “You  _ sold them out? _ ”

He exhales, staring down the empty road, lit in pre-dawn pink and gray and gold. “Yeah,” he says, and sips from his flask. “I did.”

: :

There’s a whole little dog and pony show, of course. Joe gets stabbed with a letter opener; fun stuff. Finally, though, the three of them are left alone in a laboratory, handcuffed to medical cots. As soon as the last security agent escorts the last doctor out of the room, Joe tries to worm his way out of the restraints, to no avail.

Nicky is looking over at Andy, who has been hooked up to an IV drip and bandaged. She still looks gray, dark circles under her eyes and a sheen of cold sweat on her forehead. Her eyes are closed.

“Andy,” Joe says, voice unintentionally pitched low, like he is at a funeral. “What happened?” Nicky makes a soft sound in the back of his throat. They’re both looking at her, so neither of them misses the spasm of pain that crosses her face.

"I was sloppy," Andy says, voice as soft as a dandelion seed on the wind. She doesn’t open her eyes. "No. It wasn't being sloppy. It was being human, again, finally, for the first time in millennia."

“Andy,” Nicky says, in English. “It’s going to be okay.”

Joe just closes his eyes. He’s not nice, not like Nicky. He can’t find it in himself to lie to Andy, right there to her face.

Time passes. Nicky reads how long it’s been from the little clock on his bedside table, when Joe asks. Andy doesn’t ask. Instead, she stares blankly at the ceiling, hands clenching and unclenching. Joe tries to draw her into conversation, but she remains silent.

Andromache is many things; quiet isn’t one of them. Joe and Nicky exchange worried looks.

_ We should go back there _ , Nicky says in Italian.

_ That would be nice, _ Joe says, and Andy stares in silence, one cot over, white-knuckled hands in tight fists.

: :

Booker, confession complete, lapses into inebriated silence. He presses his face into his hands, and Nile might have thought he was crying but his shoulders don’t shake. She opens the car door and stands up, slowly. She turns away from this asshole, and just - walks down the road in the early morning light. Fuck. All this bullshit because of him, she thinks, and bites back a hysterical laugh.

She doesn’t stay out there for long. Now is not the time to get weighed down in bullshit like this. A clear crystal confidence is building in Nile’s chest, now, burning her with purpose for the first time in days. She has got to do something about all of it, and the only card she’s holding right now is Booker. She turns around, opens the car door, and fixes Booker with her best Freeman family glare.

“Find me Copley,” she says. Booker sniffs and looks at her from where he is still sitting in the driver’s seat. “Find Copley, and we’ll track down his employer and get Andy and Joe and Nicky back. But right now, I need you to find him.”

“Oh, well,” Booker says, eyebrow quirking in a way that manages to be amused and depressed at the same time. “That’s easy enough. I have his address.”

Nile looks at him for a long while. She doesn’t even know what to say to that. Something of her incredulity seems to show on her face, because Booker looks away, takes another drink. Rubs at his face, like he can’t bear to look at her. Nile isn’t sure how she can bear to look at him.

“Get out,” she eventually says. She draws her gun, the weight of it a comfort in her hand. “I’m driving. Tell me where to go.”

“Wait,” Booker says. He reaches over, takes the pistol out of Nile’s hand, pops out the empty cartridge and loads it. Then he hands it back.

“Damn,” Nile says, swallowing against the taste of bile. “So you weren’t just going to sell them out, you were gonna lead them to a slaughter.”

Booker doesn’t say anything. Nile slides the pistol back into the waistband of her pants and climbs into the driver’s seat of the car, which is backwards now because they’re in England. Booker gets into the passenger seat and pulls out an iPhone that he types an address into. It’s about twenty-five minutes away. She drives in silence, while Booker counts something on his fingers, up and down.

Finally, her curiosity gets the better of her. “What exactly,” Nile asks, “was your plan once all this shit went down?”

Booker clears his throat. When he speaks, his tone is almost sheepish. “I didn’t really have much of a plan,” he says. “When I – ah, what I agreed to was one mission, to provide footage of us in action, with the understanding that if Copley’s employer wished for tissue samples I would give them. Then Andy said we needed to go after Copley, and Copley said he needed all four of us, and he asked for our address and I just –” Booker takes a generous gulp from his flask. “It got out of control.”

“But why,” Nile says, helpless fury choking her. “Why would you even  _ start _ down this path?”

“It got too much to bear,” Booker says, tipping back the last of his flask.

Nile snorted.

“What do you know of the weight of all these years alone,” Booker says. The words are angry, but it comes out pleading. His voice is rough with alcohol burn and suppressed tears. She glances at him, then looks back at the road.

“You weren’t alone,” Nile says, insistent. “You had them.” She thinks it’s a fair point; Booker must think so, too, because he tries a different tack.

“You’re young,” he says. “You don’t understand the way times wears you down –”

“Bullshit,” Nile says. “I wouldn’t betray my family. They wouldn’t betray you, either. And,  _ time  _ is your excuse? They said you were the youngest.” She takes the next turn hard, spinning the wheel under her palms. When she glances back over, Booker has his eyes closed. He lets his head fall back to bounce against the seat headrest.

“You’re right,” he says finally. “It was foolish and ugly and petty of me. I let what I wanted, and what I was afraid of, dictate my actions. And the ones I loved suffered for it. Okay?”

Nile lets out a long breath and makes the next turn on the winding little road. In the same way that his confession had burned all the uncertainty out of her, this little speech douses the anger rising up in her chest. Oh, she is angry; she will be for a good long while. But anger doesn’t serve her right now.

“We’ll get to Copley,” she says, more to steady her own nerves than anything. “We’ll find him, and then we’ll find the others, and we’ll fix this entire fucking problem that you made. That’s it.”

Booker doesn’t respond. He’s busy trying to get a last drop of whiskey out of his flask. Nile looks away from him, frustrated and more than a little bit disgusted.

They pull up to Copley’s house, parking behind a bank of trees. Wordlessly, Nile takes point. Booker cocks his pistol and follows.

Nile sweeps the stairway, Booker at her back. They clear the bottom floor in silence. Nile has to give him credit: Booker may be many terrible, shallow things, but he  _ is _ a thorough black-ops partner.

Copley is sitting on the floor of his multi-million-dollar suburban London living room when they get there. The man scrambles to his feet, hands up. Booker levels his pistol at Copley, taking a position blocking the door, which is the only exit for the room.

Nile glances around the room, which is well-lived in, for all of the minimalism chic that the outside of the house boasts. There’s a gray couch that looks more decorative than comfortable, and bookshelves and art lining the walls. The main part of the room, however, is devoted to a serial-killer-esque series of corkboards. Nile turns her attention back to Copley, raising her gun alongside Booker.

“You Copley?” she asks. Booker nods, short, in the corner of her vision.

“Mr. Booker,” he says. Then: “I don’t believe we’ve had the honor of meeting, Ms. – ?”

“Yeah,” she says. There’s no fucking way in hell that she’s giving this man her name. “I’m new. Where are they?”

“The others,” Copley says. His hands are still up; Nile doesn’t see the problem with keeping them there for a while. “Merrick took them, to be tested.” His eyes slip shut for a second, and he says, pained, “Tortured. They’re being tortured. What do  _ you _ want?” The last bit is directed towards Booker, not Nile.

"You took my family," Booker says. A muscle in his jaw jumps.

"You gave them up," Copley shoots back.

Nile rolls her eyes. These two could go back and forth all day, justifying their shitty life choices. She cocks her now fully loaded gun and points it at Copley again.

“Where are they?” she says, again, trying her damnedest to keep her voice steady.

“They’re with Merrick,” he says. That doesn’t really answer her question, but then Copley continues: “Joe and Nicky were sedated. Andromache was, too, except –” He breaks off, shaking his head a little.

“Except  _ what _ ,” Nile snaps. Booker, over on her right, shifts the slightest bit. He’s no longer covering Nile. Instead, they’re both staring deep into Copley’s face, like that will give them the answers. Copley doesn’t answer right away, not like he’s lying, more like he’s struggling to find the correct words.

“She lost her immortality,” Copley says, finally, voice shaking. “She wouldn’t stop bleeding. Why would the immortality end?”

“Is she alive?” Nile demands. Booker runs a hand over his face. Copley looks at her, eyes wet.

“She was when she reached Merrick’s facility in London,” he says. Then he shrugs, helpless. “Now, I don’t – I don’t know.”

Nile stands in front of these two deeply, deeply pathetic men and should feel rage. She should. Instead, she’s just weary, a bone-deep type of weariness. Is this how Andy feels all the time?

“He only cares about her immortality,” Copley continues. “He doesn’t care about what she’s done with it.”

“What she’s done with it?” Nile asks, but she’s already looking past him, at the corkboards. She steps forward, lets the gun drop and ghosts her fingers along the pictures pinned there. “She’s in it,” Nile breathes, “But she can’t see it. But  _ you _ could,” and she’s talking to both of them now. “And you gave them up.”

Booker has lowered his gun and isn’t looking at her. His eyes scan the corkboards, stopping at the little painting of a Napoleonic soldier taking a deep drink from a bottle of wine. His mouth twitches, like laughter, or deep sorrow.

“Take us to them,” she says to Copley, holstering her gun. Copley looks at her, looks at Booker, who just shakes his head and holsters his gun, too.

“Alright,” Copley says. His hands come down. Nile touches an old picture of Andy, in black and gray, then shakes herself and nods for Booker to go first. He leads them down the stairs and to the little open-air garage that Copley has outside.

Nile follows Copley down, keeping a sharp eye for any thrilling heroics he might feel he has to make. It doesn’t seem likely that he’ll try anything; even the man’s blue cardigan seems subdued.

Copley drives. Booker takes the backseat and Nile rides passenger. When they arrive at the fucking James Bond supervillain HQ that passes for a research lab, Copley scans them in the door.

“How many shooters on site?” she asks, stepping through the steel-and-glass door and checking the corners of the room for cameras.

“There’s no cameras here,” Copley says. “And at least thirty in the building. That’s not counting police presence.”

Nile pulls the labrys, in its innocuous black bag, onto her shoulder and grabs a gun from her duffel. Booker grabs two. Copley moves to grab a fourth, but stops when she grabs his arm.

“What are you doing?” she says. He swallows hard but meets her eyes.

“I’m going to make this right,” he says. Booker, who is arming himself up to the teeth, snorts.

“You’ll just get yourself killed,” he says, “and that won’t make anything right.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Booker’s right,” Nile says, pushing Copley away from the weapons more gently than she intended. Booker tips an imaginary hat to her, wry smile curling in his mouth. “Out of the three of us, you’re the one who won’t walk out of there again. Go. Leave the car. Try to scramble police response as well as you can. That’s all you have to do. You got us here.”

Copley leaves, apparently swayed. She doesn’t waste time watching him go. Instead, Nile gets in the elevator next to Booker and rolls her neck out, trying to get into the right frame of mind to – go and kill a bunch of people. Fuck. The floor numbers tick up, slower than she expected but still too fast.

Booker’s lips are moving, but he’s not making any sound. It occurs to her, suddenly, that these people – this old guard – maybe wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as she might have thought. After a moment of silence except for the mechanical noise of the elevator, Nile reaches out a fist and holds it out to him. Booker exhales, an exhale that might be hiding a laugh, and raps his knuckles into hers.

“We’re getting them out of here,” she says. “We’re all getting out of this.” It’s as much for her own benefit as it is for him. Still, he nods, like he understands what she’s really saying.

Fighting their way to the lab turns out to be relatively easy. When Nile stumbles through the swinging lab door, shot in one leg, Booker is there, half a step behind, laying down covering fire.

There’s a moment where all five of them just stare at each other. Nicky, Joe, and Andy are all tied to medical cots, stripped down to their underwear. When Nile looks at her, Andy is smiling, a wide, wild grin like she can’t even help it. She looks young, somehow, despite the pall of her skin and the bloody bandage on her throat.

“Nile,” she says. “Booker. Excellent timing.”

The doctor takes that moment to come after Nile with a syringe. Booker shoots her, one clean shot to the head. Nile looks at the mess of bone and blood and brains that it makes and resists the urge to vomit. There would be time for that later. She  _ hopes _ that there will be time for that later.

Nile goes to Andy first, unstraps her from the bed and hands her the clothes that are shoved under the doctor’s operating table. Booker does the same with Nicky and Joe. The three men crowd around Andy’s table as she slowly sits up.

“Are you okay?” Nile says. She barely keeps herself from reaching out, touching Andy’s shoulder. Something in her face must show what she’s thinking, because Andy bares her teeth and stands up, only a little bit shaky.

“This changes nothing,” she says. “We walk out of here like always, together.”

Joe’s already raiding the dead security agents for their weapons. Nicky pulls his shirt on and grabs an automatic. Booker doesn’t make a move to join them.

“No,” he says, low enough that Nile, standing right next to him, has to strain to hear it. “Leave me here.”

“No man left behind,” she says, and she even means it. “C’mon, Booker. We’re  _ all _ getting out of this.”

Nicky cocks his head to the side, like he’s thinking something over, his eyes sharp on Booker’s face. Booker hesitates, and for a long moment Nile honestly thinks he’s going to insist on being left behind, but he cocks his gun and steps up next to Andy.

“Let’s get this motherfucker,” Andy says, and it takes another dozen more murders and a terrifying freefall out of the penthouse window, but they do, in fact, get the motherfucker.

It’s not until they’re in the car Copley left for them, Andy for some reason driving, that Booker catches Nile’s eye again. He looks terrified, but resolute, and she knows, without a word, what he’s about to say.

“Guys,” Booker says, face blanching. “Ah. I need to tell you something.”

: :

They sentence him to forty-two years of solitude, equal to the time he spent alive before he knew them. As punishments go, it’s a slap on the wrist. He knows this. He also knows, as he watches Andy turn away from him, with that fucking bandage on her throat, that it might be the last time he ever sees her.

Booker was fine with it being the last time  _ they _ ever saw  _ him _ . He was ready for death. He didn’t think that the reverse would be worse.

He has another drink while the others leave. It’s poetic, is what it is. His life is a goddamned poem.

Nile pauses by his table until he looks up. She offers her fist. After a long, slightly dizzy moment, he puts his drink down and taps his knuckles against hers.

“It’ll be okay,” she says, and he’s not sure if she’s trying to convince him or herself.

Booker takes his hand back. “I know,” he says. Nile looks at him like she wants to say something else, then seems to think better of it. She nods, instead; Booker nods back. Without another word, she follows the others out of the pub.

He watches them go, and after a moment rests his head on the table. The world is spinning, ever so subtly. He watches them go, and closes his eyes, and waits for things to get easier.

They never do.

**Author's Note:**

> again thanks to hauntedfalcon. i'm tenderjock on tumblr, too, come over and chat with me!


End file.
